Quotes About Discipline

Spiritual disciplines answer the shallow world.

This study, which we published in 2007, provided strong evidence that the brain's attention systems can be trained. Like any form of workout, from weight lifting to cycling to learning a second language, it causes an enduring change in the system that is engaged. In this case, that change is the ability to maintain laser-sharp concentration with less and less activity in the brain's attention circuit.

Silence is one of the deepest disciplines of the Spirit simply because it puts the stopper on all self-justification. One of the fruits of silence is the freedom to let God be our justifier. We don't need to straighten others out.

obedience has a way of strengthening rather than depleting our resources. If we obey in one small corner, we will have power to obey elsewhere. Obedience begets obedience.

If we are to progress in the spiritual walk so that the Disciplines are a blessing and not a curse, we must come to the place in our lives where we can lay down the everlasting burden of always needing to manage others.

I said that every Discipline has its corresponding freedom. What freedom corresponds to submission? It is the ability to lay down the terrible burden of always needing to get our own way. The obsession to demand that things go the way we want them to go is one of the greatest bondages in human society today.

As worship begins in holy expectancy, it ends in holy obedience. Holy obedience saves worship from becoming an opiate, an escape from the pressing needs of modern life.

Simplicity The inward reality of single-hearted focus upon God and his kingdom, which results in an outward lifestyle of modesty, openness, and unpretentiousness and which disciplines our hunger for status, glamour, and luxury

Once we have made generous latitude for individual differences and schedules, we must firmly discipline ourselves to a regular pattern of prayer. We cannot assume that time will somehow magically appear. We will never have time for prayer—we must make time. On this score we have to be ruthless with our rationalizations. We must never, for instance, excuse our prayerlessness under the guise of "always living prayerfully.

train[ing] . . . in godliness" (1 Tim 4:7). This is the purpose of the disciplines of the spiritual life.

In Celebration of Discipline Richard Foster makes a distinction between self-righteous service and true service. Self-righteous service flows out of human effort and goals; true service flows out of God and love.6

Some have exalted religious fasting beyond all Scripture and reason; and others have utterly disregarded it. —JOHN WESLEY

A Spiritual Discipline is an intentionally directed action by which we do what we can do in order to receive from God the ability (or power) to do what we cannot do by direct effort.

Be encouraged by the teaching of Thomas Aquinas that "habit overcomes habit.

Absolute freedom is absolute nonsense! We gain freedom in anything through commitment, discipline, and fixed habit.

We must always remember that the path does not produce the change; it only places us where the change can occur. This is the path of disciplined grace. There

By means of intense personal discipline Flannery O'Connor was able to rise above a debilitating disease to become one of the finest fiction writers of the twentieth century. Freedom is the product of discipline and commitment.

Discipline is to present us before grace, it does not produce grace to make sense.

Without the cross the Discipline of confession would be only psychologically therapeutic. But it is so much more. It involves an objective change in our relationship with God and a subjective change in us. It is a means of healing and transforming the inner spirit.

the Spiritual Disciplines are the means God uses for producing in us the needed transformation of heart and mind and soul.

Silence is one of the deepest Disciplines of the Spirit simply because it puts the stopper on all self-justification. One

Bonhoeffer writes, "Real silence, real stillness, really holding one's tongue comes only as the sober consequence of spiritual stillness."6

A farmer is helpless to grow grain; all he can do is provide the right conditions for the growing of grain. He cultivates the ground, he plants the seed, he waters the plants, and then the natural forces of the earth take over and up comes the grain...This is the way it is with the Spiritual Disciplines - they are a way of sowing to the Spirit... By themselves the Spiritual Disciplines can do nothing; they can only get us to the place where something can be done.

reject anything that is producing an addiction in you.